How Ferrari Won the 2024 Monaco Grand Prix by Driving Slowly

Lap one, Monte Carlo. The cars are still climbing the hill out of Sainte Devote and the radio crackles in Charles Leclerc's helmet. His engineer, Bryan Bozzi: stay positive, red flag, go to the pit lane. And Leclerc's first words back aren't about the race. They're... is everybody okay?

Because behind him, something's gone badly wrong.

Kevin Magnussen has tagged Sergio Perez on Beau Rivage. Fastest, blindest stretch of the whole circuit. The Red Bull is destroyed, Perez is out. Drivers fine, cars not. And that crash decides the Monaco Grand Prix... without a single overtake.

Wait. Without one overtake? For how long?

Seventy-seven laps. And it got so strange that the F I A invented a whole new rule to stop it ever happening again. Then, this February, they deleted it.

Okay, that's a story. Start with the red flag. What does a red flag actually change?

Everything. Cars sit on the grid, teams are allowed to change tyres for free, no pit lane time loss. So every driver completes their mandatory pit stop while standing still. Ferrari boss Fred Vasseur said it plainly afterwards: after the red flag, they had to manage seventy-seven laps on the same set of tyres.

Seventy-seven laps on one set. That's the entire race.

The entire race. And it ruined Mercedes. They'd started both cars on the hard tyre, which under the rules meant they HAD to switch to the softer medium later. Lewis Hamilton rolls into the pit lane and tells his team... I told you so.

That's cold.

Their engineer Andrew Shovlin admitted it had pros and cons. A safety car later on and they'd have looked like geniuses. A lap-one red flag just made it awkward.

So from the restart, Leclerc's leading his home race. What's his actual job? Don't crash?

His job is to drive slowly. Deliberately, strategically slowly.

Why would anyone slow down when they're winning?

Because of what a pit stop costs here. Call it twenty-odd seconds. If Leclerc sprints off into the distance, he stretches the whole field out, and suddenly Oscar Piastri, or Carlos Sainz, or George Russell has a twenty-second hole behind them. They dive in, take fresh tyres, come back out in exactly the same position.

Oh — and now they're on new rubber and he's still on tyres from lap one.

And if a safety car comes out after that, they're ahead of him. So Ferrari keep everybody bunched up on purpose. Bozzi on lap eight: we're happy with your tyre management, keep it like this. Then later: if you can, we need to slow down a bit. Leclerc asks why. Bozzi says, we are preventing McLaren from having a pit stop window.

So the leader is being used as a rolling roadblock. For himself.

Exactly that. And it gave us the radio moment of the season. Leclerc, bored out of his mind, offers up some information. He says, do you want to know the margin, how much faster I could go? Bozzi: no Charles, we are not interested, we know. Leclerc: you said no, right? Bozzi: no, we're not interested. And Leclerc goes... that's rude.

He's sulking at a hundred and sixty miles an hour.

Meanwhile Piastri is a second and a half behind, asking his own team why on earth Ferrari are slowing down this much. He got one look before the tunnel. Said afterwards he didn't have a car small enough to fit through the gap.

Gripping stuff for everyone watching.

Max Verstappen spent seventy-seven laps in sixth and told his team: this is boring, I should have brought my pillow. Alex Albon, stuck behind Yuki Tsunoda, said everyone was happy to manage tyres — they just didn't need to manage THIS much.

And Hamilton?

Made a real pit stop, grabbed the fastest lap point, and called it one of the dullest races he'd ever been in.

But nobody got past Leclerc.

Nobody seriously tried. Top five finished exactly as they restarted — Leclerc, Piastri, Sainz, Norris, Russell. Twenty-sixth of May, twenty twenty-four. Pole on Saturday, led every single lap on Sunday, and finally won the race he grew up watching from his bedroom window.

So it worked perfectly. And it was also kind of unwatchable.

Which is where the rule comes in. For twenty twenty-five, the F I A forced every driver at Monaco to make two pit stops, three different sets of tyres. Manufacture some drama. And the teams gamed it inside one afternoon — using one car to back the field up so the other could stop for free.

That's Ferrari's trick. Just with more cars doing it.

Drivers called that race very ugly. Lando Norris won it and criticised the whole attempt to manufacture racing. And then on the twenty-eighth of February, twenty twenty-six, the F I A quietly deleted the rule from the sporting regulations. One season and gone. F One's chief executive Stefano Domenicali still defends it as the right attempt.

So the lesson is... you can't legislate overtaking?

The lesson is that strategy was never about going fast. It's about controlling other people's options. Ferrari won Monaco by making sure nobody else had a choice to make. Hand an engineer a rule — any rule — and they'll find the version where their rival is trapped.

And the governing body spends the next year trying to shut the door.

Charles Leclerc won his home grand prix by driving slower than he could. That's the sport. Not the fastest lap... the smartest one.